1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a fabric and to a method of machine knitting a piece of fabric suitable for use as an upholstery fabric, for example for covering the seats in vehicles, particularly automobiles.
2. Description of related Art
In fabric used for upholstery purposes it is often desired to produce different regions of the fabric with different structures, in order to provide a pleasing aesthetic effect. Often the different regions are made separately and joined together by sewing. If the fabric is a weft knitted fabric, it is a simple matter to knit some courses of the fabric using one knitting structure and to knit other courses using one or more different structures, in order to provide a fabric with contrasting bands disposed parallel to the course direction of the fabric. It is a different matter, however, if it is desired to produce a weft knitted high stitch density fabric suitable for upholstery applications in which a plurality of wales of one knitted structure are disposed side-by-side with a plurality of wales of a different knitted structure. If it is attempted to produce such a fabric on a knitting machine, it is often found that puckering occurs along the line where the fabric changes from one structure to the other. In order to avoid this puckering effect, it has been necessary in the past to knit the two differently structured fabric regions as separate fabric pieces and then to sew the two fabric pieces together in the wale-wise direction, which is a time-consuming and costly procedure.